Read the Top N Rows from Large Text Files with C#

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This post describes one way that you can read the top N rows from large text files with C#. This is very useful when working with giant files that are too big to open, but you need to view a portion of them to determine the schema, data types, etc. I’ve used PowerShell many times to do this with large csv files, but in this example we’re going to use C# and look at the Wikipedia XML dump of pages and articles. The 3017-03-01 dump is very large and comes in at 59.5 GB. The script is short and simple. All it does is readRead More →

Query XML on the Web with C# and SSIS

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This post describes how to query XML on the web with C# and SSIS. The emphasis is on the C# code, as I assume the reader is somewhat familiar with the SSIS Script Task. And in order to allow anyone to easily try this example, there is no authentication step. If you’re retrieving XML values from an API, there’s a good chance that you will need to authenticate first. I recently worked on a data integration project where I had to perform two steps involving a REST API in order to download web analytics data. In order to download data in bulk from this API, you firstRead More →